The Master Essayist

Our conclusions towards the end of the last chapter open up new ways of thinking about Al-e Ahmad’s prose and politics as we move steadily towards considering his legacy for the posterity of a post-Islamist liberation theology. The question of gender remains central and even definitive to the moral imperative of that liberation theology. If that liberation theology will remain pathologically masculinist and its politics ignorant of the gendered disposition of being a Muslim, let alone an intellectual, then that liberation could never shed its reactionary disposition. It is of course absolutely necessary and indispensable for women of different classes and races to be integral to the social and political disposition of that liberation – in the formation of the very public sphere upon which that theology is to be articulated.